Ephesians 4:22–25
You were taught, with regard to your
former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its
deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on
the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
The more
we get what we now call "ourselves" out of the way and let Him take
us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that
millions and millions of "little Christs," all different, will still
be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented — as an author
invents characters in a novel — all the different men that you and I were
intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It
is no good trying to "be myself" without Him. The more I resist Him
and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and
upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call
"Myself" becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which
I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call "My wishes"
become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me
by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and
a good night's sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by
regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to
the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real
origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals, I am not, in my
natural State, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I
call "me" can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ,
when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real
personality of my own.
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